Kate Griffith | Cornell University (original) (raw)

Papers by Kate Griffith

Excerpt] This article examines why the historical relationship between immigration law and privat... more Excerpt] This article examines why the historical relationship between immigration law and private bills has not continued following the enactment of the 1996 immigration laws for any of the affected immigrant groups. The article focuses on LPRs with criminal convictions in particular because their likelihood of deportation has increased dramatically as their access to executive discretion to avoid deportation has decreased. Since 1996, even if an LPR has lived in the United States since childhood, she can be subject to mandatory deportation for almost any criminal conviction – including misdemeanors, such as shoplifting or a bar fight. Since 1996, it is much more likely that an LPR with only one conviction will be subject to deportation and that someone subject to deportation pursuant to a criminal conviction will be barred from access to executive discretion. Despite these increases in the likelihood of deportability and severe restrictions in executive discretion, only one person...

PSN: Migrant Workers (Topic), 2020

In July 2017, President Trump held a rally on Long Island, New York and—amidst sweeping national ... more In July 2017, President Trump held a rally on Long Island, New York and—amidst sweeping national efforts to curb immigration flows to the United States and to limit the rights of those already here—he in-voked notions of Long Island’s “liberation” from the influx of immi-grants. Then, following a string of other restrictionist moves, and through a series of announcements from September 2017 to January 2018, Presi-dent Trump announced the termination of the Temporary Protected Sta-tus (TPS) program—a long-standing humanitarian immigration program. The termination of TPS meant that the documented status and work au-thorization of thousands of Central American migrants—on Long Island and across the United States—could suddenly shift to undocumented status. Currently, the termination of TPS is on hold due to court injunc-tions; however, its future is unsettled. This Article assesses forty-two in-depth interviews with Long Island-based TPS holders who may soon become undocumented and ide...

LSN: Employment Tort Law (Topic), 2017

In recent years, California has served as the primary laboratory for policy experimentation relat... more In recent years, California has served as the primary laboratory for policy experimentation related to unauthorized immigrant workers’ rights. No other state, to date, has advanced comparable policy initiatives that preserve state-provided workers’ rights regardless of immigration status. Through close examination of two open Supremacy Clause questions under California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the article illustrates that states can, as a constitutional matter, and should, as a policy matter, serve as laboratories for unauthorized immigrant worker rights. Exploring the outer boundaries of state action in this area is particularly compelling given the significant labor force participation of unauthorized immigrants in low-wage jobs in the United States, given the disproportionate labor rights violations experienced by this population and given thirty years of federal legislative inaction on comprehensive immigration reform.

Landscapes Of Struggle

Excerpt] How do military regimes seek support or legitimacy from society? What strategies, beside... more Excerpt] How do military regimes seek support or legitimacy from society? What strategies, besides violent repression, do military leaders use to remain in power? In other words, how do military leaders try to achieve hegemony? El Salvador’s long period of military rule (1931-1979) gives researchers ample opportunity to investigate the mechanisms whereby military regimes try to gain societal support. Erik Ching’s chapter shows that General Martinez’s regime sought support through locally based patron-client relationships. Some analysts of El Salvador’s subsequent military regimes find that these regimes pursued a political alliance with urban industrial workers in order to gain support. Nevertheless, the alliance between the state and urban industrial workers during the 1950s and 1960s remains overgeneralized in the literature. Even those who specify Salvadoran governmental policy during this period as “repression with reforms” do not fully elaborate the mechanisms whereby military leaders formed an alliance with urban industrial workers. Moreover, research on these later military regimes has not explored the role that gendered labor reforms played in solidifying the alliance. As a result of this oversight, researchers may have underestimated the reformist tendency of Salvadoran military regimes from 1944 to 1972. Drawing on newspaper accounts and government publications, we show that adopting labor legislation designed to protect women workers was an element of a broader government strategy to ally with urban industrial workers. Examining how military regimes seek societal support is important because each strategy to secure regime legitimacy may have different social implications. For example, gendered labor legislation can have important social implications for industrial women workers. Research on other countries suggests that labor laws giving women special protections tend to make employers less willing to hire them and that special legal protections for women workers can depress women’s participation in the industrial labor force. Therefore, by illuminating the gendered nature of the reforms pursued by the Salvadoran military regimes, we hope to contribute to future research on the potential relationship between labor reforms and women’s industrial labor force participation in El Salvador.

This article considers President Trump’s immigration efforts through an immployment law lens. Imm... more This article considers President Trump’s immigration efforts through an immployment law lens. Immployment is a conceptual frame that reminds us to consider (1) immigration policy’s impacts on employers and the employment-based rights of workers, and (2) employment and labor law’s impacts on immigration policy. It draws from available enforcement data to argue that Trump’s regime is intensifying the use of workplace-based immigration enforcement tools such as audits of employer records and arrests of workers at their place of work. While his predecessors used these tools too, Trump is simultaneously pursuing both high profile worker arrests and bureaucratic audits as key tools of a more aggressive immigration enforcement strategy. The Trump administration is also deviating from his predecessors by un-authorizing large groups of authorized workers. The article focuses its attention primarily on one such targeted group, workers with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), who may soon lose t...

LSN: Other Law & Society: Private Law - Labor & Employment Law (Topic), 2020

Even though alt-labor does not have significant labor market power when compared to labor unions,... more Even though alt-labor does not have significant labor market power when compared to labor unions, its impacts are manifold. Alt-labor has given rise to novel state and local legislation improving wages and working conditions for low-wage workers across the country. It has fostered new collaborations with government enforcement agencies to improve the implementation of rights on the books — to “make rights real.” It has promoted new bargaining and worker organizing strategies, outside of traditional models. This article highlights another achievement of alt-labor. Alt-labor has served as a catalyst for creative litigation efforts that argue for application of existing workplace protections to non-traditional populations of workers and their organizing efforts. In this way, it has pushed to reinterpret, and thus to revitalize, what many perceive to be outdated labor and employment laws. We focus on initiatives that re-imagine the interpretation of these laws in light of new organizing...

Labor: Public Policy & Regulation eJournal, 2019

On the 80th anniversary of the federal wage and hour statute, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 193... more On the 80th anniversary of the federal wage and hour statute, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), critics warn that it cannot keep pace with shifting business trends. More and more individuals engage in “contract work,” some of which takes place in the much publicized “gig economy.” These work arrangements raise questions about whether these workers are “employees,” covered by U.S. labor and employment law, or “independent contractors.” Subcontracting arrangements, or what some call domestic outsourcing, are also expanding. Indeed, more and more workers in the U.S. economy engage with multiple businesses, raising questions of which of these businesses are “employers” responsible for the payment of wages. These are pressing questions for the judiciary, policymakers, scholars of work, and the U.S. Department of Labor because many of these individuals work in low-wage sectors and do not make minimum wages or overtime premiums for the hours they work. This Article uses a system...

Excerpt] As we examine the criminalization of immigration, commonly referred to as “crimmigration... more Excerpt] As we examine the criminalization of immigration, commonly referred to as “crimmigration” (Stumpf, 2006), it is essential to consider its impact on other areas of law and policy that involve immigrants but are not traditionally thought of as formal elements of either criminal law or immigration law. Why? As Hortensia’s story illustrates, crimmigration may unexpectedly affect protections and rights that relate to immigrants’ experiences but come from other areas of law and policy. This chapter explores the impact of crimmigration on labor standards enforcement. By labor standards enforcement, the chapter refers mainly to the wage and hour, health and safety, anti-employment discrimination, and collective activity protections that emerge when an employee performs labor for an employer. At the federal level, the statutes that provide these rights include the National Labor Relations Act (1935), the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Occupation Sa...

CJRN: Other Administration of Justice (Topic), 2017

Employee claims against employers, rather than government-initiated investigations, are the motor... more Employee claims against employers, rather than government-initiated investigations, are the motor of the workplace law enforcement regime in the U.S. Immigration status is a well-documented source of immigrant worker precarity that may inhibit some immigrant workers from making claims against their employers, even when faced with the most egregious violations of their basic protections in the workplace. But how does immigration status inhibit claimsmaking, and how might that be different for immigrant workers with different statuses under immigration law? We address these questions by looking at three types of immigrant workers who lack permanent status in the U.S: unauthorized workers, low-wage guest workers sponsored by employers, and workers with temporary reprieves from deportation and work authorization. We draw from our analysis of legal institutions, relevant secondary literature and a pilot study of workers in New York City with Temporary Protected Status. We propose that th...

What happens when a person is simultaneously viewed as an unauthorized immigrant without rights a... more What happens when a person is simultaneously viewed as an unauthorized immigrant without rights according to a federal regime and as an employee with rights according to a subfederal regime? In the wake of widespread and inconsistent adjudication of this issue, this Article sheds new light on this pressing question. To date, pertinent court battles and scholarship have led to a virtual stalemate and often focus exclusively on normative policy arguments. By contrast, this Article employs an empirically grounded review of fifteen years of legislative history to analyze this paradox. This review illustrates that the denial of workplace protections to unauthorized workers runs contrary to immigration law purposes. The Article, therefore, provides a fresh perspective on an otherwise intractable debate. In doing so, it also develops a more scientifically grounded forensic approach to legislative history which addresses some of the most salient and passionate critiques of legislative histo...

Excerpt] Since the publication of Janice Fine’s path-breaking book, Worker Centers: Communities a... more Excerpt] Since the publication of Janice Fine’s path-breaking book, Worker Centers: Communities at the Edge of the Dream in 2006, scholars and commentators on the left and the right of the political spectrum have grappled with how to characterize these emergent worker organizations on the US labor relations scene. This chapter deepens our understanding of the nature of worker centers by examining the funding trends that underlay the wide range of experimental organizing and advocacy strategies highlighted in other chapters of this volume. Undoubtedly, to emerge and survive, these organizations need money (Bobo and Pabellon 2016). But how financially stable are worker centers? How big are they? Where does the funding come from? How do they compare to labor unions? To address some of these questions, we compiled a large collection of available data to complete the first systematic empirical analysis of worker center funding across multiple years (2008 through 2014).

The “Fight for Fifteen and a Union” movement among fast-food workers and their allies has raised ... more The “Fight for Fifteen and a Union” movement among fast-food workers and their allies has raised awareness about wage inequality in the United States. Rather than negotiating for better wages and working conditions with economically weak restaurant-level franchisees, the movement aims to affect the practices of what they view as the all-powerful brands — the franchisors. Few would dispute the notion that the franchisor brands, not their franchisees, set industry-wide standards and, thus, have the ability to offset rising wage inequality and improve working conditions. And yet, the movement has raised controversial law and policy questions about the legal responsibilities of these fast-food Goliaths under current labor and employment laws. Should fast-food brands, as franchisors, be legally responsible as “employers” for the wage-and-hour violations suffered by the individuals who serve us fast food in their franchised stores, pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)? Do they ...

As private sector labor union membership in the United States dwindles, the number of worker cent... more As private sector labor union membership in the United States dwindles, the number of worker centers continues to grow. Given worker centers’ focus on low-wage workers largely engaged in service sectors of our post-industrial economy and their relatively recent entrance into the field of United States labor relations, scholars and commentators are increasingly debating the applicability of the eighty-year-old National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to the worker organizing activities of these emerging organizations. Unlike prior work on the relationship between the NLRA and worker centers, this Essay considers the extent to which NLRA protections have been helpful to worker center organizing efforts to date and proposes several theories to explain why worker centers have not turned to the NLRA’s protections more proactively.

Worker centers empower communities of workers that are challenging for labor unions to organize. ... more Worker centers empower communities of workers that are challenging for labor unions to organize. This includes immigrant workers and other vulnerable workers in high turnover jobs. These centers often organize workers that fall within the definition of “employee” under the Depression-era laws designed to protect some forms of collective worker activity from employer retaliation. Although employees associated with these centers can benefit from labor law’s carrot, worker centers are not “labor organizations” subject to labor law’s vast reporting requirements and restrictions on associational behavior (labor law’s stick). We use an original study of worker centers’ filings to the Internal Revenue Service to reveal that worker centers are more similar to nonprofits, than labor organizations. Both First Amendment and labor law principles affirm the characterization of worker centers as organizations that are not subject to labor law’s stick. Providing worker centers access to labor law’...

Law & Social Inquiry

The state plays a key role in shaping worker precarity, and employers are key actors in mediating... more The state plays a key role in shaping worker precarity, and employers are key actors in mediating this process. While employers sometimes may act as willing extensions of the deportation machinery, they are also subjects of the immigration state. In this article, we highlight the impact of state-employer dynamics on migrant workers with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These workers have only provisional permission to live and work in the United States, but are not tied to any single employer. Even though they are privileged over unauthorized workers and employer-sponsored guest workers, TPS holders experience their own brand of state-induced precarity. Their employers risk civil or criminal liability if they are not in compliance with work authorization requirements and must repeatedly navigate an unpredictable and confusing immigration bureaucracy. Drawing on interviews with 121 low-wage TPS workers and two dozen of their advocates in the New York City metropolitan area, our find...

ILR Review

This article is the third in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The se... more This article is the third in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes the journal has featured over its many years of publication. In this issue, we also feature a special cluster of articles and book reviews on one of the most critical labor market issues across the globe—the legalization and integration of immigrants into national labor markets. Despite the urgent need for immigration reform in the United States, there is a paucity of US research that looks at the impact of a shift from unauthorized to legal immigrant status in the workplace. The US immigration literature has also paid little attention to immigrant legalization policies outside of the United States, despite the fact that other countries have implemented such policies with far more regularity. The articles in this special issue draw on studies of legalization initiatives in major immigrant...

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, May 14, 2012

With the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), Congress intended to provide private-sector... more With the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), Congress intended to provide private-sector employees with the right to organize collectively for their mutual aid and protection in the workplace. However, the NLRA faces a tsunami of criticism, much of which highlights its inadequacies with respect to protecting collective activity among employees. In light of the NLRA’s myriad limitations, some

... intensifies”). 21. Lee, supra note 1, at 1092, 1100, 1128; see also Jayesh M. Rathod, Immigra... more ... intensifies”). 21. Lee, supra note 1, at 1092, 1100, 1128; see also Jayesh M. Rathod, Immigrant Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Regime, 33 NYU REV. L. & SOC. ... REC. 20,829 (1982) (statement of Sen. Simpson ...